Obama Enlists Major Powers to Aid Poor Farmers With $15 Billion

L’AQUILA, Italy — President Obama has enlisted the world’s leading powers to contribute $15 billion to help millions of the world’s poorest farmers grow enough food to feed themselves, American officials said Wednesday.

If the assistance is delivered and is in fact mostly new money, it will constitute the largest international effort in decades to combat hunger by investing in the fundamentals of an agricultural economy, including seed, fertilizer, grain storage and research into new plant varieties.

This aid package effectively recognizes the growing consensus among philanthropists, economists and African governments that efforts to reduce poverty on the continent are probably doomed without far greater investment in agriculture. While aid to educate the poor and keep them healthy is critical, so is helping millions of farmers grow more food and earn some income.

Mr. Obama, who has made improving the productivity of farmers in the developing world a top priority since taking office, lobbied other world leaders to join him in backing this venture during telephone conversations in recent weeks. Leaders from Italy and Japan, among others, also took the lead in forging a consensus. The resulting commitments, to be unveiled Friday, may be among the most tangible achievements of his first summit meeting with the Group of 8 powers, here in L’Aquila.

“We don’t need fancy computers to solve these problems,” Mr. Obama said in a recent interview with allAfrica.com, which distributes news from across the continent. “We need tried-and-true agricultural methods and technologies that are cheap and are efficient but could have a huge impact in terms of people’s day-to-day well-being.”

The $15 billion, to be spent over three years, would come from the United States and the other Group of 8 members: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Canada and Japan. They have promised to better coordinate their efforts to avoid a mismatched quilt of programs, with the World Bank in a pivotal role.

Without the details of the financing from each country, it is hard to gauge the actual scale of the new package. Some of the promised aid seems likely to be old money counted as new. An Obama administration official, Michael Froman, said after a briefing on Wednesday that all the United States’ agricultural assistance was being counted as “new money” because the administration could have chosen to spend nothing.

Still, the amount of global aid now given to agriculture, about $5 billion a year, is so low that advocates and charity leaders said the infusion of new money was substantial, even as they insisted that they would need to study the fine print to measure just how significant it would be.

“This is a major initiative and will mark a turning point in the hunger challenge,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist who has long campaigned for increased aid to farmers. “For more than 20 years there was not only a neglect of agriculture, but a reliance on shipping emergency food aid.”

Mr. Obama announced in April that he was asking Congress to double American financial support for agricultural growth in developing countries to more than $1 billion a year in 2010. The American share of the $15 billion Group of 8 program would be $3.5 billion over three years, a sum that includes what the United States already spends annually.

A draft statement said the new program “differs from previous approaches first because we will coordinate at country, regional and global levels and commit to work as partners with all stakeholders.” Also, the statement said, “it is focused squarely on agriculture development, which has for long been neglected.”

Andrew S. Natsios, who led the United States Agency for International Development under President George W. Bush, said, “It’s better late than never.” Mr. Natsios, long a frustrated advocate for agricultural aid, said: “Most of the poorest people in the world are farmers and herders who live in rural areas. Unless you address agriculture, all development programs will be unsustainable.”

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Aid for agriculture plummeted by 75 percent from the late 1980s to the early 1990s and remained at a low level, according to a June report by Oxfam International, the aid organization. The amount only recently began creeping up to about $5 billion in 2007.

But the issue did not gain real political traction until last year, when soaring food prices caused a growing number of people to go hungry and contributed to food riots in more than 30 countries.

The worsening global economy this year has pushed even more people into poverty. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that the number of hungry people will grow by almost 100 million this year, reversing a four-decade downward trend.

Some aid experts, like Dr. Helene D. Gayle, president of CARE, the international group, are optimistic about efforts to help poor farmers. Many groups like hers have been working in the countryside for years, hampered by a shortage of money. “We’re not starting from scratch,” she said.

Professor Sachs points to the success of Malawi, in southern Africa, which sharply raised food production by providing widespread subsidies for fertilizer.“You can double, even triple or quadruple food production from one growing season to the next by enabling small-holder farmers to get access to high-yielding seeds, fertilizer and agricultural extension services,” he said.

But William Easterly, a New York University economist, said Mr. Obama should study the past to avoid repeating it.

Robert S. McNamara, the former World Bank president who died Monday, undertook the last great push for investment in African agriculture in the 1970s. Evaluations found that many of those projects failed. They were too complicated. They relied too heavily on Western experts. Sometimes the governments themselves had little commitment to them.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Enlists Major Powers to Aid Poor Farmers With $15 Billion. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe